Ecosystem changes in the Nile Valey revealed through Egyptian art

The importance of the Nile valey to Egypt is wel known. What is not so well known however is that approximatelly 6,000 years ago there was a thriving ecosystem more related to the African savanah that people associate with places in Sub saharan Africa like the Serengeti or Kenya. What was very little known  until recently was how this ecosystem changed over time. Scientists in the field of Paleoecology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in the USA have used artistic depictions to track changes in the vegetation and animal life for this time period. Rellevant evidence suggests that a combination of climate change and increasing human impact where jointly responsible for extinctions of a very large number of animal species most of which can be classed as megafauna ,species like the African Elephant. They also managed to track the changes in food web dynamics, that is how interactions changed as the ecosystem changed following these extinction events. Apparently the ecosystem of the nile delta is very impoverished today. The changes happened in specific time intervals with the latest one being the industrialization of Egypt in the end of the 19th century AD.

Click here to see an animation of the changes in Portuguese made by Estadao, a Brazilian news website

What is important is that this can provide us with a potential model for how megafauna and vegetation changed in other parts of the world like Europe or Asian Siberia. It can also provide useful insight into knowledge that can be used for ecosystem restoration and provides valuable ecological information for supporting the philosophy and ideas behind  Rewilding  which is explained in the relevant video by John Monbiot in a TED conference in London ,United Kingdom.

for more details on the research , the rellevant peer reviewed journal publication can be found bellow.

Yeakel JD, Pires MM, Rudolf L, Dominy NJ, Koch PL, Guimarães PR Jr, Gross T. Collapse of an ecological network in Ancient Egypt. PNAS, (2014) 111(40): 14472-14477. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1408471111